The Worm

In today’s new page of art from my upcoming anxiety memoir, Float, we meet The Worm. You can read more about the characters from Float in the site’s About section.

The Worm is used in the book to portray some of my most sensitive moments from my life. He’s an unfinished work and a physical embodiment of sadness. He once had beautiful wings and flew in the sky, but Anxiety wrecked him and sent him falling. Where will he land?

As I began to write this book, I tried recall of the moments when anxiety interfered in my life. It was definitely affecting me in grade school and then in high school my anxiety grew more powerful. My anxiety was still beneath the surface, but I know friends and family had to have noticed these strange outbursts in my behavior. After combing through my memories, I concluded anxiety had cost me my first true relationship. I was irrational and filled with fear. I assumed it was just how everyone acted. Now I know better but anxiety still gets the best of me. I’m hoping I can stop it before it wrecks more friendships and relationships that I have. I have to strengthen my resolve against the attacks and use tools such as breathing exercises to battle back.

I had a brief fight with anxiety just posting this page of artwork because the correct image wouldn’t show to Facebook.There’s something tragically poetic in that.

The Kickstarter for Float will launch May 1st, 2017. Every week I’ll be debuting new pages from the book here in this blog.

The art of The Worm is incredible. I’ve been thinking back as well as discovering anxiety playing a role. I mentioned in another forum how I how a hard time in grade school. (Well, and all thru school, really.) My mom remembers peeling my fingers off the handle of the car door to get me into school. And then you mentioned about your technical issue and anxiety. Yesterday I was having a similar issue, and finally had to use my meditation app to calm myself. But it lingered for quite awhile. I’m trying to learn how to get ahead of it before it really nails me, to recognize early signs and to take a step back rather then doubling down and ending up how I usually do. Asperger’s plays into it as well. I think of myself often as my favorite Muppert, Beaker, squeaking and rubbing his hands together. But then I remember my art with me as Ripley, scared, yes, but determined to face it and win. Sorry for the ramble.

Thank you. The Worm is representative of myself in my most simplest form. I was an extremely sensitive kid who grew up into a oversensitive adult. I’ve always felt things deeply and a lot of that is caused by anxiety. The key to stopping the attacks is to catch the signs and then combat them before they spiral out of control. I’m still trying to master this. I let the monster win too many times.

Allison Walker Payne

Me too. That’s the trick, I guess, stop it early. Once it gets going, it takes a long time to claw back out again! I used to have nightmares where I wanted to fly but there were thick black power lines everywhere. Now I think they represented that monster having power over me.